Smart Moves: Tips on clearning your home office

Are you preparing to put your house on the market and know you must remove an abundance of extra items before that can happen? If so, professional organizers urge you to allow extra time to declutter your home office.

”It’s very time-consuming to go through everything in a home office, so you must make it a priority,” said Laura Leist, author of “Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life.”

Leist, who owns a professional organizing firm, said many sellers face tremendous problems dealing with the stacks of paper, books and magazines that crowd their home offices.

”People don’t know how to make decisions about paper, what to keep and what to toss out or put through the shredder,” said Leist, a former president of the National Association of Professional Organizers (www.napo.net).

Ronni Eisenberg, author of “Organize Your Home Office,” said the process of decluttering a home workspace isn’t nearly as hard for younger people who grew up with computers as it is for older people.

Regardless of how difficult it is, clearing out your office is a pre-sale necessity.

”People can’t picture themselves living in your house if it’s filled with clutter in any room, let alone the home office,” said Susan Pinsky, a veteran organizer and author of books on the topic.

Johnson Service Group boss Chris Sander knows more about clean and dirty laundry than most. Having started with a Saturday job on delivery vans at the age of eight, he became a Johnson’s salaried employee 31 years ago, joined the board in 2008 and was promoted to chief executive last year.

Back in 2008, Johnson shares hit a low of 9½p. Since then, Sander has helped steer the stock to today’s price of 86½p.

Midas first looked at the business in March…………… continues on This is Money